


Hands

by mayrwyn



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-18
Updated: 2017-05-18
Packaged: 2018-11-02 07:12:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10939557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayrwyn/pseuds/mayrwyn
Summary: Her hands were the first thing he noticed about her and the thing that did him in.





	Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Daryl, on Carol being gone, immediately after the prison fell.

Her hands were the first thing he noticed about her and the thing that did him in.

At the quarry, she was all but invisible. A skinny, skittish woman hovering around the edges of the group. He hadn’t bothered to learn her name. In the first hour, Daryl figured he knew all that he needed to know about the woman. 

But then there were her hands. 

It all began with a stack of rabbits. One minute he was arranging things around him the way he liked, getting ready to set about cleaning the things, and then a small hand had darted into his pile of game. He was irritated, and nearly told her they didn’t have time for her to waste game tryin’ to learn what to do, but something made him pause and watch for a second. Three cuts into to first one Daryl went back to focusing on his own work. The first cut was hesitant and slow, but by the third her hands settled into a practiced familiarity that had him fighting a grin. There was something else there, peeking out from underneath those upper middle class polished manners every now and then, and sparked as many answers as it did questions. She’d slipped up with the rabbits. He knew her now. Her hands gave her away.

Daryl couldn’t decide, at first, if he liked her more or less once he knew there were all sorts of things hiding underneath her fear. He didn’t try to decide, neither. It wasn’t important. He was only watching her out of the corner of his eye now and then because she was one of the group, and a smart man always knew who he was surrounded by. After that he took special notice of how Carol – and it was none of anyone’s business that he’d learned her name – was always busy. He didn’t think that anyone else had realized how she quietly slid into the spaces between everyone and made herself useful. How her hands were always moving. Whenever the camp grew quiet, she would sit in the sunlight, and she would find some little thing to sew.

Somehow, between skinning a rabbit in the late spring and burying a little girl in the high summer, he became attached to that sewing. Watching the graceful, steady movement of her hands as she worked on a stack of mending was hypnotic. Small, deft fingers dancing like falling leaves on the air, yet steady and sure at the same time. 

Come winter, they were on the road. Tired, hungry, and a hundred different shades of cold. Her hands were on him now, and he spent long days caught between wanting to squirm away from them and memorizing all the different ways they felt. 

The first moment, they were shaking in terror, clutching desperately to him as if their owner was as afraid of being behind him on the bike as she was the dead assholes all around them. They didn’t loosen, exactly, when the dead faded into the distance and the shaking only slowed down a little. That fear faded quickly, though. After that, her hands only ever shook with the cold. Usually, they fell almost casually at his waist, but now and then they would make their way up to his chest the way they had that first night, and he knew then that she was growing tired, afraid she would fall asleep and fall right off the bike. Not long after, he would feel her forehead come to rest between his shoulder blades.

He liked those times the best, but that wasn’t anyone’s business but his own.

As time went on, her neat little stitches made their way from cloth to flesh. One by one, each of them were stitched together by those hands. From the tiny line underneath Carl’s left knee that was, as embarrassing as the child found it, the result of falling off a porch in the dark, to the fourteen-stitch long line running down T’s left bicep where he had turned into the path of Maggie’s butcher knife in the middle of a herd.

After a shelving unit came down on him in the middle of a gas station, pinning him under it for the damned Walker to nearly take a chunk out of his ankle because he couldn’t reach the damned thing, she stitched herself a straight, neat line between Daryl’s collarbone and his heart. 

Her hands were steady even as her voice shook. “That was too close, Daryl Dixon. Don’t you ever do anything like that again.” Her fingers dropped briefly when she was done, ghosting over the scar on his side where he got stuck by his own bolt like an idiot while he was looking for her girl.

“Ain’t nothin’,” he said.

They pulled away from him, clenching into fists that she hid in the pockets of her jacket.

“This isn’t nothing. You aren’t nothing. Be more careful.”

And then she was gone again.

Later, he lost Merle. He was curled in on himself, just wanting to be left the hell alone, and by that time the rest of them were smart enough to do just that. Long after the cell block was dark and everyone was asleep, as he lay there trying to figure out how in the hell he was supposed to feel about anything, he felt movement near him. She was as familiar to him now as his own self, probably more if he were honest. It was quiet and still, and the feeling of her fingers carding through his hair broke him. The tears forced their way out of him on a shudder, and it was all he could do to at least be quiet about it.

He wasn’t completely quiet. But it was okay. She wouldn’t say anything.

He could do this with her here.

Her hands didn’t leave his hair until nearly dawn, when she drifted away from him again on silent feet, before someone else woke.

Before someone saw. Because she knew that he couldn’t take that.

He couldn’t put a name to the feeling that bloomed in his chest the moment he realized that it was okay that she saw. He knew that it wasn’t one he felt before, and that he wasn’t sure he wanted to feel it now.

He spent a long winter walking in circles with her at the center. Poking at that strange, foreign feeling. Working out how it was sometimes loud and insistent and sometimes quiet and soft in the background, but always just kind of there. Getting used to it.

Getting used to her, and the way she was part of him whether she knew it or not.

But then she was gone, and the prison was gone, and nothing mattered anymore. 

As he sat across the fire from a girl he never bothered to get to know who had suddenly become a responsibility he didn’t want to face, he stared at his hands and remembered hers. Herschel patting her hand after those first stitches, telling her she had done fine. Her knuckles red and raw as she paused to wring water from yet another blood-stained pair of pants at a roadside creek. The quick and sure movement of the knife as she chopped carrots from some house’s root cellar for their stew, the sound of her laughter in the background as she waxed poetic about what a treat it would be. The dainty way they moved when she was threading a needle.

The way those hands felt moving through his hair. Cupping the side of his face. The backs of her knuckles brushing against the backs of his as they passed in a corridor. Things they never talked about. Moments that they ignored, or at least never mentioned.

She probably never even noticed.

He wished that just once, when they brushed against each other, he had threaded his fingers through hers and slid their palms together. Just once.

Just to see if she held on, or let go.


End file.
